which, judging from traces of building, and the superiority of situation, must have been on a rocky eminence running out into the bay, and connected with the land by a narrow swampy isthmus.

At the foot of this height five mutilated statues of white marble have been lately dug up, three female figures of colossal size, one of which is recumbent, and exhibits tolerable execution; the others had, in our judgment, no peculiar excellence.

At the little port we observed the inhabitants embarking for the supply of the Athenian market vegetables that are raised on the land adjoining the village, which has almost the appearance of an English market garden.

Returning from our walk round the bay, we found a tolerable hovel, in one apartment of which we spent the night. It was cold, and our room being on an upper story, reached by a stair-case from without, with a boarded floor, a fire on it was

out of the question, and we several times regretted our earthen floor at Scala, and the blazing fire we there managed to keep up. Bad as it appeared to our inexperience, we found that as we went farther we fared worse.

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CHAPTER X.

IERO-NAPOLI.-TRAVELLING ARRANGEMENTS.

PALAMEDE.

[9TH AND 10TH FEBRUARY.]

AT six the following morning (the 9th February) the horses were at the door, hired for the sum of five drachmæ each, to convey us to Napoli; ourselves quitting the main path, and going round by Iero to visit the grove sacred to Esculapius, where we were led to expect some remarkable antiquities, while our servants and baggage took the direct road. After three hours' riding, we arrived at Iero; the first part over a fertile plain, on which tobacco and cotton were growing; then through a romantic defile along the side of a rocky

hill, with a mountain torrent tumbling beneath; the path in some places a mere shelf, only broad enough for one to pass, with a sheer precipice above and below; while in others it wound through a beautiful shrubbery, where the myrtle and arbutus were joined over our heads by festoons of the clematis in full bloom and odour. By such a path we arrived at the place on which stands, or rather stood, Iero. The name Iero, and the relative situation to Epidaurus, as well as the ruins on the spot, leave no doubt as to the identity of the place with the sacred city of Esculapius. Pausanias, in most editions and versions, is made to say, that the "Sacred Grove was on all sides surrounded by mountains, and that within that circuit it was not lawful to be born or to die :" an expression which, besides its seeming to attribute a personal responsibility, in the only two matters in which one can have no choice, would lead us at first sight to

suppose that the sacred inclosure and interdict extended on every side to the foot of the mountains, and overspread the whole valley, city and all; but this apparent absurdity must have arisen from reading opn, mountains, instead of poi, bounds or fences. The passage appears to me to mean that the Sacred Grove was an inclosed precinct, from which dying and parturient patients were removed. This accords too with what Pausanias adds, that in his own time Antoninus Pius erected outside this boundary hospitals for lying-in women, and for the sick in the last stage of danger.

The only remains now traceable of this 'Bath' of antiquity are those of the theatre. Innumerable fragments of other buildings lie around, but nothing like an edifice, or anything to guide visitors in appropriating to any particular object these confused ruins. Even the name of a Grove no part of the neighbourhood now deserves, for there are scarcely a dozen trees in the